Auster Man in the Dark

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-24614-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Auster's haunting exploration of war in a post 9/11 world from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) 'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.' Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would rather forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder, in Iraq, of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. Brill, a retired book critic, imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the Twin Towers did not fall on 9/11, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts another hidden story, this time of his own marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death. Passionate and shocking, political and personal: Man in the Dark is a novel that reflects the consequences of 9/11, that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. He and Spencer Ostrander collaborated on Bloodbath Nation. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honours include the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the Screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was translated into more than forty languages. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in November 2023. He died on 30 April 2024.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Auster, Paul

Leseproben

No, I haven’t forgotten. The cough sent me spinning into another zone, but I’m back now, and Brick is still with me. Through thick and thin, in spite of that dismal excursion into the past, but how to stop the mind from charging off wherever it wants to go? The mind has a mind of its own. Who said that? Someone, or else I just thought of it myself, not that it makes any difference. Coining phrases in the middle of the night, making up stories in the middle of the night—we’re moving on, my little darlings, and agonizing as this mess can be, there’s poetry in it, too, as long as you can find the words to express it, assuming those words exist. Yes, Miriam, life is disappointing. But I also want you to be happy.

Fret not. I’m treading water because I can see the story turning in any one of several directions, and I still haven’t decided which path to take. Hope or no hope? Both options are available, and yet neither one is fully satisfying to me. Is there a middle way after such a beginning, after throwing Brick to the wolves and bending the poor sap’s mind out of shape? Probably not. Think dark, then, and go down into it, see it through to the end.

The injection has already been given. Brick falls into the bottomless black of unconsciousness, and hours later he opens his eyes and discovers that he’s in bed with Flora. It’s early morning, seven-thirty or eight o’clock, and as Brick looks at the naked back of his sleeping wife, he wonders if he wasn’t right all along, if the time he spent in Wellington wasn’t part of some bad, nauseatingly vivid dream. But then, as he shifts his head on the pillow, he feels Virginia’s bandage pressing into his cheek, and when he runs his tongue over the ragged edge of his chipped incisor, he has no choice but to face the facts: he was there, and everything that happened to him in that place was real. By now, there is only a single, improbable straw to clutch at: what if the two days that elapsed in Wellington were no more than a blink of the eyes in this world? What if Flora never knew he was gone? That would solve the problem of having to explain where he’s been, for Brick knows the truth will be difficult to swallow, especially for a jealous woman like Flora, and yet even if the truth comes out sounding like a lie, he doesn’t have the strength or the will to concoct a story that would seem more plausible, something that would appease her suspicions and make her understand that his two-day absence had nothing to do with another woman.

Unfortunately for Brick, the clocks in both worlds tell the same time. Flora knows that he’s been missing, and when she turns over in her sleep and inadvertently touches his body, she is instantly jolted awake. His anxieties are stilled by the joy that comes rushing into her intense brown eyes, and suddenly he feels ashamed of himself, mortified that he ever could have doubted her love for him.

Owen? she asks, as if hardly daring to believe what has happened. Is it really you?

Yes, Flora, he says. I’m back.

She throws her arms around him, holding him tightly against her smooth, bare skin. I’ve been going crazy, she says, rolling the r with an emphatic trilling of her tongue. Just crazy out of my head. Then, as she sees the bandage on his cheek and the bruises around his lips, her expression changes to one of alarm. What happened? she asks. You’re all beat up, baby.

It takes him over an hour to give a full account of his mysterious journey to the other America. The only thing he leaves out is Virginia’s last remark about wanting to charm his pants off and fuck his brains out, but that is a minor detail, and he sees no point in riling up Flora with matters that have little bearing on the story. The most daunting part comes toward the end, when he tries to recapitulate his conversation with Frisk. It barely made sense to him at the time, and now that he’s back in his own apartment, sitting in the kitchen and drinking coffee with his wife, all that talk about multiple realities and multiple worlds dreamed and imagined by other minds strikes him as out-and-out gibberish. He shakes his head, as if to apologize for making such a botch of it. But the injection was real, he says. And the order to shoot August Brill was real. And if he doesn’t carry out the job, he and Flora will be in constant danger.

Until now, Flora has listened in silence, patiently watching her husband tell his absurd and ridiculous story, which she considers to be the largest mound of crap ever built by human hands. Under normal circumstances, she would fly into one of her rages and accuse him of two-timing her, but these are not normal circumstances, and Flora, who knows every one of Brick’s faults, who has criticized him countless times during the three years of their marriage, has never once called him a liar, and in the face of the nonsense she has just been told, she finds herself stunned, at a loss for words.

I know it sounds incredible, Brick says. But it’s all true, every word of it.

And you expect me to believe you, Owen?

I can hardly believe it myself. But it all happened, Flora, exactly as I told it to you.

Do you think I’m an idiot?

What are you talking about?

Either you think I’m an idiot or you’ve gone insane.

I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I haven’t gone insane.

You sound like one of those crackpots. You know, one of those guys who’s been abducted by aliens. What did the Martians look like, Owen? Did they have a big spaceship?

Stop it, Flora. That isn’t funny.

Funny? Who’s trying to be funny? I just want to know where you’ve been.

I’ve already told you. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted to make up another story. Some stupid thing about getting mugged and losing my memory for two days. Or being run over by a car. Or falling down the stairs in the subway. Some drek like that. But I decided to tell you the truth.

Maybe that’s it. You got beat up, after all. Maybe you’ve been lying in an alley for the past two days, and you dreamed the whole thing.

Then why would I have this on my arm? A nurse put it there after they gave me the shot. It’s the last thing I remember before I opened my eyes this morning.

Brick rolls up his left sleeve, points to a small flesh-colored bandage on his upper arm, and tears it off with his right hand. Look, he says. Do you see this little scab? That’s the spot where the needle went into my skin.

It doesn’t mean anything, Flora replies, dismissing the one piece of solid evidence Brick can offer. There are a million different ways you could have gotten that scab.

True. But the fact is it happened just one way, the way I told you. From Frisk’s needle.

All right, Owen, Flora says, trying not to lose her temper, maybe we should stop talking about it now. You’re home. That’s the only thing that matters to me. Christ, baby, you don’t know what it was like for those two days. I went nuts, I mean one hundred percent nuts. I thought you were dead. I thought you’d left me. I thought you were with another girl. And now you’re back. It’s like a miracle, and if you want to know the truth, I don’t really care what happened. You were gone, and now you’re back. End of story, okay?

No, Flora, it’s not okay. I’m back, but the story isn’t over. I have to go up to Vermont and shoot Brill. I don’t know how much time I have, but I can’t sit around and wait too long. If I don’t do it, they’re going to come after us. A bullet for you and a bullet for me. That’s what Frisk said, and he wasn’t joking.

Brill, Flora grunts, pronouncing the name as if it were an insult in some foreign language. I bet he doesn’t even exist.

I saw his picture, remember?

A picture doesn’t prove anything.

That’s exactly what I said when Frisk showed it to me.

Well, there’s one way to find out, isn’t there? If he’s some kind of hotshot writer, he has to be on the Internet. Let’s turn on my computer and look him up.

Frisk said he won a Pulitzer Prize about twenty years ago. If his name isn’t on the list, then we’re home free. If it is, then watch out, little Flora. We’re in for some big trouble.

It won’t be, Owen. Count on it. Brill doesn’t exist, so his name can’t be there.

But it is there. August Brill, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. They look further, and within minutes they have uncovered vast amounts of information, including biographical data from Who’s Who in America (born NYC, 1935; married Sonia Weil, 1957, divorced 1975; married Oona McNally, 1976, divorced 1981; daughter, Miriam, born 1960;

B. A. from Columbia, 1957; honorary doctorates from Williams College and the Pratt Institute; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; author of more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and columns for magazines and newspapers; book editor of the Boston Globe, 1972–1991), a Web site containing over four hundred of his pieces written between 1962 and 2003, as well as a number of photographs taken of Brill in his thirties, forties, and fifties, leaving no doubt that these are younger versions of the old man in the wheelchair parked in front of the white clapboard house in Vermont. Brick and Flora are sitting side by side at a small desk in the bedroom, their eyes fixed on the screen in front of them, too afraid to look at each other as they watch their hopes turn to dust. At last, Flora switches off the laptop and says in a low, quavering voice: I guess I was wrong, huh?

Brick stands up and begins pacing around the room. Do you believe me now? he asks. This Brill, this goddamn August Brill …...